Related papers: Desalination due to Electrical Image Forces

Electrical image potentials near a metallic or a dielectric wall of higher dielectric constant than that of the solution are attractive, and therefore, can concentrate salt ions near the wall. It has recently been observed that near a…

Electrical image potentials can be important in small spaces, such as nanoscale pores in porous electrodes, which are used in capacitive desalination and in supercapacitors. It will be shown here that inside pores in porous metallic…

The dielectric permittivity of salt water decreases on dissolving more salt. For nearly a century, this phenomenon has been explained by invoking saturation in the dielectric response of the solvent water molecules. Herein, we employ an…

Water inherently contains trace amounts of various salts, yet the microscopic processes by which salts influence some of its physical properties remain elusive. Notably, the mechanisms that reduce the dielectric constant of water upon salt…

We consider an electrolyte solution confined by semipermeable membranes in contact with a salt-free solvent. Membranes are uncharged, but since small counter-ions leak-out into infinite salt-free reservoirs, we observe a distance-dependent…

Salt water is ubiquitous, playing crucial roles in geological and physiological processes. Despite centuries of investigations, whether or not water's structure is drastically changed by dissolved ions is still debated. Based on density…

Humid hydrophobic ionic liquids, widely used as electrolytes, have narrowed electrochemical windows, because their water, absorbed on the electrode surface, gets involved in electrolysis. In this work, we performed molecular dynamics…

Any structural transformation of water is sensitive to an external electric field, since water molecules have dipole moments. We study influence of external uniform electric field on crystallization of supercooled water enclosed between two…

Water desalination through nanopores has been shown to be a promising alternative to the currently water purification processes. In spite the results in this direction obtained by means of computational simulations were animating there are…

We examine an electric double layer containing an antagonistic salt in an aqueous mixture, where the cations are small and hydrophilic but the anions are large and hydrophobic. In this situation, a strong coupling arises between the charge…

Life on Earth depends upon the dissolution of ionic salts in water, particularly NaCl. However, an atomistic scale understanding of the process remains elusive. Simulations lend themselves conveniently to studying dissolution since they…

Salt transport in bulk electrolytes is limited by diffusion and convection, but in microstructures with charged surfaces (e.g. microfluidic devices, porous media, soils, or biological tissues) surface conduction and electro-osmotic flow…

We introduce a field-theoretic electrolyte model composed of structured solvent molecules and salt ions coupled by electrostatic and hard-core interactions. Within this explicit solvent theory, we characterize the salt-driven dielectric…

The subtle interplay between critical phenomena and electrostatics is investigated by considering the effective force acting on two parallel walls confining a near-critical binary liquid mixture with added salt. The ion-solvent coupling can…

Screening of a strongly charged macroion by oppositely charged colloidal particles, micelles, or short polyelectrolytes is considered. Due to strong lateral repulsion such multivalent counterions form a strongly correlated liquid at the…

In this tutorial we discuss the chemical potential of ions in water (i.e., in a salt solution, in an electrolyte phase) and inside (charged) nanoporous materials such as porous membranes. In water treatment, such membranes are often used to…

Hypothesis. The dielectric constant of an electrolyte solution, which determines electrostatic interactions between colloids and interfaces, depends nonlinearly on the salinity and also on the type of salt. The linear decrement at dilute…

The electrostatic correlations between ions profoundly influence the structure and forces within electrical double layers. Here, we apply the modified Gaussian Renormalized Fluctuation theory to investigate the counter-intuitive phenomenon…

Water desalination by capacitive deionization (CDI) is performed via electrochemical cells consisting of two porous carbon electrodes. Upon transferring charge from one electrode to the other, ions are removed from the feedwater by…

Despite the ubiquity of aqueous electrolytes, the effect of salt on water organization remains controversial. We introduce a nonlocal and nonlinear field theory for the nanoscale polarization of ions and water and derive the electrolyte…